JENKINS: A letter to Ramona in her time of sorrow

Property values will not plummet. In time, you will draw clean energy from what seems like a total defeat at the hands of the Board of Supervisors.

Yes, the solar “farm” — I know, you hate that euphemism for Sol Orchard LLC’s power plant — got the green light from four of the five supes.

You did everything any town could. You pulled your hair. You rent your garments. You predicted a death ray to your agrarian heritage. Amazingly, none of your residents broke ranks. The front was united against the slick solar suitor.

Understandably, you resent a Carmel-based outsider leasing farming land to generate electricity for SDG&E, a utility that’s none too popular in the backcountry.

Only Supervisor Dianne Jacob (and to an ambivalent degree, Supervisor Dave Roberts) was emotionally swayed by your fear and loathing of the 43-acre solar plant on Warnock Drive.

Jacob, playing the populist shrink, felt your pain and appealed for more study of alternative sites. But she was just giving you a shoulder to weep on.

Ultimately, your argument — you love solar energy but hate this site within a 110-acre hog farm — failed the supes’ smell test.

You swore that this cleanest, least disruptive of commercial uses would “devastate” the landscape. In your panic, you called the solar field, largely hidden from all but elevated view, “blight.”

I know, I know. You were half out of your mind. But when you’ve calmed down, you’ll grow to love the elegant generator of clean, quiet power. My prediction: It will wind up being the coolest, certainly the best-groomed man-made landmark in Ramona. As a neighbor, you couldn’t ask for a stronger, more silent type.

How can I betray you this way? you ask.

Well, I drove out Tuesday afternoon and took a look at the lay of the farmland.

The pasture, which encircles the hog farm, is OK for grazing cattle but not much else. Prime farming land? In your dreams, Ramona.

The hog farm shares an arterial road with rundown single-family homes as well as dairy and egg farms (and a paintball park) that would, I’m afraid, constitute Appalachian blight in a Norman Rockwell painting of pastoral America.

Frankly, house pride is not on display. Rusted-out tanks in front yards. A muddy lot filled with cows. And the smell? Well, let’s just say it reminds me of Aunt Aggie’s ranch.

Oh, that’s right. You don’t know who Aunt Aggie is.

While it’s true I live in the city, where the closest thing to farming is Whole Foods, believe it or not, I’ve got cattle manure in my DNA.

My blacksmith great-grandfather in 1901 pulled up stakes in Julian to homestead in the Imperial Valley. For stretches of summers and vacations, I’d drive with my grandmother to my great-aunt’s dairy ranch near El Centro and hang around the barns with the Mexican workers.

Aunt Aggie’s dairy farm, and its tiny ramshackle house, was, at least in its physical aspects, right out of Tobacco Road. (Or more aptly, Alfalfa Road.)

Believe me, I have nothing against farm life and its casual approach to curb appeal. More power to it.

But at the same time, let’s not romanticize the real-estate values of a neck of Ramona that, on aesthetic as well as environmental grounds, will be enhanced, not mutilated, by a solar farm in its midst.

Ramona, of all the cuts you endured Wednesday morning, I suspect the cruelest came from one of your own.

A Valley Center avocado grower, North County Supervisor Bill Horn said that he agreed with state policy, which says solar energy and farming are inherently compatible.

“You should be asking these folks to stay,” he said to you before throwing out an invitation to Sol Orchard: “You’re welcome to come to my farm.”

Out in the backcountry, the power of the sun is also on the rise. Ramona, you’ll just have to go with the flow.